IB History Economic Changes Including Equal Pay and Employment Rights Notes

Economic Changes: Equal Pay, Credit, and Workplace Rights

1. Between 1960 and 1979, the feminist movement secured a series of legal changes that reshaped women's economic lives.
   1. You can trace this progress through court rulings, landmark legislation, and the slow dismantling of rules that had long kept women out of better-paying work.

Workplace Discrimination Cases

1. Before the 1960s, many states had "protective" labour laws that set limits on the hours women could work or the weight they could lift.
   1. These rules were framed as safeguards, but in practice they barred women from night shifts, overtime pay, and physically demanding jobs that paid more.
2. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) were the main federal bodies responsible for enforcing workplace discrimination law.
   1. Their effectiveness varied, but pressure from women's rights groups pushed them to take sex discrimination more seriously over the course of the decade.
3. Mengelkoch v Industrial Welfare Commission (1968): a California law restricting working hours for women was challenged on the grounds that it violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964).
   1. The case helped establish that state "protective" laws could not override federal anti-discrimination protections.
4. Weeks v Southern Bell (1969): the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a company rule that barred women from lifting more than 30 pounds.
   1. Ruling that employers could not use generalised assumptions about women's physical capacity to exclude them from jobs.
5. Phillips v Martin Marietta (1971) went to the Supreme Court and ruled that a company could not refuse to hire mothers of young children while freely hiring fathers of young children.
   1. The decision rejected what became known as "sex-plus" discrimination, where employers added a second condition (being a mother) on top of sex.
6. Together, these rulings made it much harder for employers to use biological difference or family status as grounds for excluding women from work.

Equal Pay and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act

1. The original Equal Pay Act (1963) had required equal pay for equal work, but it excluded large categories of workers.
   1. The 1972 amendment extended its coverage to executive, administrative, and professional employees, closing a gap that had allowed employers to pay women in professional roles less than their male counterparts.
2. Pregnancy remained a point of active discrimination well into the 1970s.
   1. Many employers fired women when they became pregnant or refused to hire women they believed might become pregnant.
   2. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) made this illegal.
   3. It classified pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions as forms of sex discrimination under Title VII, meaning employers had to treat pregnancy the same as any other temporary medical condition.
3. The EEOC played a central role in enforcing both of these laws.
   1. Over the course of the 1970s, it handled a growing caseload of sex discrimination complaints, though backlogs and limited resources meant enforcement was uneven.

Financial Independence

1. Access to credit was a key dimension of economic independence that workplace cases did not address.
   1. Before 1974, banks and credit companies could legally refuse to issue a credit card or mortgage to a woman without a male co-signer.

1. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974) removed these barriers.
   1. For the first time, women could build credit histories in their own names, making it possible to rent apartments, take out business loans, or buy homes without depending on a husband or father.
2. The Community Reinvestment Act (1977) addressed a related problem.
   1. Banks had systematically avoided lending in lower-income and minority neighbourhoods.
   2. The Act required banks to demonstrate they were serving all segments of their communities.
   3. While not targeted specifically at women, it helped address some of the structural lending barriers that disproportionately affected women in poorer areas.
3. Financial independence mattered because economic dependence had been one of the mechanisms keeping women in subordinate positions.
   1. If you had no access to credit, leaving a marriage, starting a business, or moving to a new city required male permission or assistance in a very practical sense.

Limits of Economic Progress

1. The legal gains of the 1960s and 1970s were real, but their impact was uneven.
   1. Stagflation (the combination of high inflation and high unemployment that characterised the mid-to-late 1970s) created difficult economic conditions just as many of these laws were coming into force.
2. Working-class women benefited less from the new legal framework than professional women did.
   1. Many of the gains in equal pay law focused on executive and professional roles.
   2. Women working in domestic service, agriculture, or low-wage retail faced persistent underpayment with less legal recourse.
3. Occupational segregation also limited the practical reach of equal pay legislation.
   1. If women and men were rarely doing the same jobs, "equal pay for equal work" applied to a narrow slice of the workforce.
   2. The broader question of whether female-dominated sectors were underpaid relative to comparable male-dominated sectors (the concept of comparable worth) was not addressed by the legislation of this period.
4. Race intersected with all of these limitations.
   1. Black women faced both sex discrimination and racial discrimination.
   2. The data consistently showed they earned less than white women, who in turn earned less than white men.
   3. The legal gains of the feminist movement, often driven by predominantly white, middle-class organisations, did not fully account for these compounding disadvantages.

The Enforcement Gap

1. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could investigate discrimination, but weak enforcement and occupational segregation limited the effect of new federal rights.
2. Working-class women did not simply wait for federal agencies to act.
   1. In 1974, women trade unionists founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) to push the labour movement itself to take women's economic demands seriously, including equal pay, childcare, and access to union leadership.
3. The Farah strike (1972 to 1974) was one example of this working-class organising.
   1. Another was 9to5, founded in 1973 in Boston by Karen Nussbaum and other clerical workers, who organised office staff around demands mainstream feminist organisations rarely addressed: fair pay scales, promotion paths, and basic respect on the job.
4. 9to5 later helped found a labour union for office workers and showed that economic organising among working women did not have to run through either NOW or a traditional trade union.